I have a question about a practice listening test!! Why is the correct answer D? I choose C. It doesn't make sense.

Transcript

P: That's exactly right. If you make something too simple, people get mad. They think that the writer thinks they're stupid. But a funny thing happened. More and more people started reading USA Today. About a year after it started, it had a circulation of more than one million. Today, its circulation is past two million. Question?

S2: Yo, what does circulation mean?

P: Circulation is the number of papers that are read each day. It means [false start] It means that USA Today distributes more than two million copies of each issue. When other papers saw this circulation grow, they became worried. So, they started to, uh, copy USA Today's style. Their stories got shorter, and they started using lots of color photos and charts. They replaced quote unquote serious news with feature stories. Soon, it became normal for newspapers to look like USA Today. But it wasn't only appearance that made USA Today so popular. One very big reason for its success was timeliness. Timeliness means its ability to report the latest news. Daily newspapers have a deadline, which is the time they have to stop writing and start printing the paper. The deadline often caused papers to leave out news. This was especially true of East Coast papers and, erm, West Coast sports scores. Basketball, football and baseball games would end on the West Coast at 11 p.m. But that's 2 a.m. Eastern time. This was too late to put the score of the game in the next day's paper. USA Today, however, used satellites to transmit news. It could set later deadlines, so it could include the West Coast scores. This, alone, caused many people to buy the paper. Yes?

S3: But today most papers use satellites. So why has USA Today's circulation kept growing?

P: Excellent question. Uh, actually, USA Today has changed. It still looks colorful, but it's started to become more like traditional papers. It's stories are getting longer, and it has more international news. It changed because people are changing. The paper needed to appeal to more, um, educated readers, because they're the ones with money. Also, it needed to sell more papers overseas. International readers don't want "dumbed down" news.

What can be inferred about circulation?

A. It measures the number of people who buy each issue of the paper.

B. It measures the number of people who read each issue of the paper.

C. It measures how many people buy and read each issue of the paper.

D. It measures neither how many people buy nor read each issue of the paper.